Current Internet Protocol (IP) networks comprise a plurality of nodes, including a plurality of routers at the core of the network and a plurality of hosts at the edge of the network. The routers collectively link the communication channels between hosts. The nodes are assigned network-wide unique IP addresses to enable proper and efficient traffic forwarding to destination nodes. The routers route packets in the IP networks based on the IP addresses carried in the packets. The packets are forwarded by the routers to proper destinations based on a <source address, destination address> pair, which may be indicated in each packet. IP version 4 (IPv4) is a commonly deployed IP protocol in many networks, such as Local Area Networks (LANs) and the Internet. An IPv4 address comprises about 32 bits, including an IP address prefix that comprises up to about 24 bits. Accordingly, a router can handle up to about 16 million (or 224) destination addresses. The IP addresses may also be allocated in blocks based on different geographical areas, which allows the aggregation of IP addresses based on geographical area and thus reduces the search space for destinations at the router.
Some current networks include content networks that provide content or services to customers, such as on-demand content. In a content network, a content router is responsible for routing user requests and content to proper recipients. In the content network, a domain-wide unique name is assigned to each entity that is part of a content delivery framework. The entities may comprise data content, such as video clips or web pages, and/or infrastructure elements, such as routers, switches, or servers. The content router uses general name prefixes (which can be full content names or proper prefixes of content names) to route content packets within the content network. As such, the routing decision space is extended a substantially larger name space in comparison to the limited IP prefix space, which presents some problems to current router architectures or schemes, e.g. which are based on IP address forwarding.